Legends of Amacia: Mysteries of Tiamat
The Mysterious Relic

“It’s notso much tell as it’s show,” Dan declared as he opened his satchel, pulling outa strange-looking object and sitting it on the coffee table. “We found thisthing in sector 256, deep in the machinery area,” Dan informed. “It’s unlikeanything else we’ve found. All of our tests on it are inconclusive.”

Hannibalwithdrew his arm from around Selina and leaned forward to examine thecuriosity. “Indeed,” he agreed, staring at the object. “This is truly strangeand I’ve seen strange, especially after that screwed-up nightmare I had thismorning before getting up.”

“Whatnightmare, Hannibal?” Selina asked.

“I’ll tellyou about it later,” Hannibal replied. “It’s so messed up that I’m going tohave to work up the courage to share it again.”

“Okay,”Selina purred, “let me know when you’re ready to tell it. My ear is always openif you care to use it.”

Hannibalnodded as he continued to stare at the item. “This is really an enigma. Ihaven’t a clue as to what it is. What do you think, Selina? Have you seenanything like this in your travels?” he asked, gently picking up the odditythat was no bigger than a mid-sized portable radio.

Selinagingerly took the odd Relic from Hannibal and carefully examined it from everyangle. “Very strange,” she commented. The Relic appeared to be an eight-sidedpyramid with a strange spherical crystal at the apex of the pyramid. Thecrystal spanned nearly two inches in diameter with hundreds of facets. Itseemed to be fastened to the pyramid with an unusual golden holder with eightprotrusions that resembled claws. The claws reached up two-thirds of the way onthe surface of the crystal. The crystal’s color consisted of a weird, unearthlytranslucent tint of magenta and scarlet mixed. The octagonal pyramid sat on alarger, eight-sided base that flared out three more inches beyond the four-inchthick base of the pyramid, which tapered in slightly so that the bottom wasjust a bit smaller than the top of the base. Each of the pyramid’s facetsmatched up with the facets of the base, which changed proportionally. Where thepyramid and the base came together, a golden seam nearly half an inch wideringed it. In association with this golden ring were what appeared to be agolden ribbon or strap that reached from midway down on the base terminating ina point to the golden seam, and then up the pyramid a couple of inches from thegolden seam, terminating there in a point as well. Eight of these straps, whichwere a quarter inch wide lined each facet edge of the pyramid and were engravedwith extreme detail in a weird and unusual type of writing that vaguelyresembled a combination of hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing. These symbolscovered both the straps and golden ring seam. Along each facet of the baseabout two inches up from the bottom lay a singular seven-sided hole with whatlooked to be some kind of precious stone recessed inside it. On the very bottomin the middle of the base lay a small octagonal hole with a thin slot thatextended about an inch on opposite sides of the hole. The pyramid and baseglowed very slightly and appeared to be composed of some unknown metal thatlooked like a combination of gold, platinum, and mercury. The entirety of itssurface with the exception of the very bottom of the base lay etched with thesame strange writing as was on the straps and golden seam. Selina looked verycarefully at it, slowly rotating it as she examined it. “I can’t say that I’veever seen anything like this,” she declared, “but it does remind me ofsomething I heard of in a myth on my planet. Has my father seen it?”

“Yes,” Dansaid. “He got a good look at it the other day right after we found it.”

“What didhe say about it?” Hannibal asked.

“He hasn’tseen anything like it either. But one thing he was able to come up with is themetal this thing is made out of is the same metal that’s in the books,” Daninformed.

“You’rekidding,” Hannibal returned, intrigued with the report.

“No, I’mnot. It’s apparently the same metal,” Dan said.

“Well thatjust deepens the mystery, doesn’t it?” Hannibal stated. “You said you foundthis in area 256? Tell me exactly what the place looked like.”

“This thingwas found in a room that was about fifty feet across,” Dan said. “The door wasbooby trapped so that anyone who tried to open the door would be cut topieces.”

Hanniballooked at Harry, and then at Selina, who was still absorbed in studying theRelic. He remembered the map and the diabolical trap that killed one of hisclosest friends years before and shuddered slightly. “Did the blades come outof the ceiling, floor, and walls timed with perfect precision to cut anythingto pieces within their reach?” he asked.

Dan cast astrange, puzzled look at Hannibal. “Why yes. It did,” Dan stated. “We lostFranklin that day. I warned him to be careful but he didn’t pay any attentionand paid the ultimate price for his folly. After it happened, I was reminded ofhow you lost David replaceing the map. That booby trap was an extremely nastypiece of work. After Franklin was killed, the others paid much closer attentionto my instructions.”

“I shouldhope so,” Hannibal replied. “Being chopped into fish bait by an ancient trap isnot a good way to die.”

“Well, howdid you get past it?” Harry asked.

“There wereseveral things we had to do to get into that room,” Dan began. “The first thingwas to disengage the blades.”

“The floorimmediately in front of the door was pressure sensitive, wasn’t it?” Hannibalsurmised.

“Yes, itwas. The blades operated within six feet of the door set at three-inchintervals and could cut through steel as if it were butter,” Dan declared.

“Nokidding,” Hannibal replied. “You tried to jam the blades and they cut througheverything you put in front of them?”

“It did,”Dan stated. “After we retrieved Franklin’s remains using poles to drag him outof the trap, we used I-beams to hopefully stop the blades. They sliced thoughthe beams like a laser.”

“Thoseblades must be made of a material unknown to our science to be able to cutthrough steel like that,” Hannibal murmured. “Okay, what did you do next?”

“Anyway,once we realized we weren’t going to be able to jam the blades, we tested thefloor, replaceing it pressure sensitive from five feet of the door to two and ahalf feet of the door,” Dan explained. “Anything on the floor in that area setsoff the machinery. The blades reach from six feet to two feet of the door,coming out of the floor, walls, and ceiling with such speed and precision thatthey barely could be seen. Once we found the extent of the trigger, we made alittle bridge to cross that area of floor to stay off it. During that time ofexperimentation, we noticed a very small toggle on the wall next to the door sowhen we got across the trigger, we threw the switch and then proceeded to testthe floor again. That time nothing happened; the blades didn’t come out. Ijury-rigged a lock on the switch so that it couldn’t be re-engaged, re-settingthe trap. As deadly as the blades were, they were only a minor inconvenience.The door, however, was another story altogether. The door had writing andfigures all over it. The lock consisted of a series of seven riddles set insidea strange panel. Press the appropriate sequence of figures in answer of the 1striddle and it would trigger the next riddle. Answer wrong and a set ofguillotine blades made of the same material as the other blades would come downright on the spot where the combination on the door was, resetting the lock,and shuffling the riddles so we’d have to start from scratch. That made thechore of opening the door not just difficult, but right down dangerous. Afterseeing that first trap dice Franklin, I felt ill at ease with setting thecombination in person. Therefore, we rigged up a pole with which we could pushthe figures from beyond the first set of blades. It was a fortunate move sinceour first answer was wrong, revealing the guillotine blades right at the door.Those blades sliced through our aluminum poles like butter. We spent almost amonth trying to figure out the riddles and disengage that trap. Eventually, wefigured out the riddles and opened the door.”

“Riddlesare common in ancient locks,” Hannibal murmured. “But to have a series of sevenriddles is not. That indicates a level of security that borders on the absurd.And the fact you say that the riddles shuffled when you got it wrong indicatesthat whoever sealed this Relic away in that room did so with the thought ofnever letting it see the light of day ever again. At what point did you realizethe riddles were repeating?”

“About twoweeks into our attempts to open it,” Dan stated. “When we hit the first riddlewrong and set off the blades, we noticed that as the blades descended theriddle panel changed.”

“How did itchange?” Hannibal asked.

“The riddlesat in a window,” Dan stated. “The material the riddle was written on rotatedwhen the blades came down, revealing another riddle after the blades recycled.”

“Interesting,”Hannibal said softly, rubbing his chin. “So the door had some kind of clockworkmechanism in it.”

“That’s myguess,” Dan stated. “I’ve never seen such an elaborate mechanism in a door likethat before.”

“What wasthe hardest riddle?” Harry asked.

“It was thelast riddle we answered,” Dan stated, “the one that finally opened the door. Itwent something like this: It devours all: birds, beasts, grass, flowers, trees,peasants, kings; even the gods must answer to it; it crumbles iron; grindssteel into meal; extinguishes light yet dispels darkness; swallows stars whole;dries up seas and floods all; consumes life yet brings it forth; it gougesvalleys deep and breaks the great high mountains down with its mighty hands.”

“Whoa,”Hannibal replied. “That’s a hard one all right.”

“Indeed,”Harry agreed. “That one will definitely leave you scratching your head.”

“Well, itstumped some of our best researchers,” Dan stated. “We’d been working on thatriddle for almost ten days when Nathanael and Selina proved their clevernessand answered the riddle correctly.”

Selina lookedup from her inspection of the Relic with a smile as Hannibal glanced over ather. “Yes, that’s right,” she purred. “My dad and I mulled over that riddle fordays when it suddenly became obvious what the answer was.”

“Well, whatwas it?” Harry asked.

“Before Ianswer, you try to figure it out for yourself, Harry,” Selina stated. “Theanswer to that conundrum is so big and so obvious that it hides itself in plainsight.”

Harry’sliving room became quiet as a tomb. Hannibal rubbed his chin with his hand ashe pondered the riddle. After five minutes, Harry blurted out, “I give up. Thisone is beyond my measly intellect.”

“Don’t giveup,” Selina urged. “It’s staring you in the face. What does all those things?It’s something we cannot escape no matter where we go or what we do.”

Mary’s facesuddenly lit up in epiphany when she happened to glance at the wall clock.“Time,” she said. “The answer is time. It’s the one thing, the only thing thatdoes all those things.”

“Bravo,”Selina crowed. “That’s right!”

Hannibal’seyes grew wide. “Oh goodness me,” he chimed. “It’s so obvious I didn’t see it.Time is the one thing most humans don’t give a second thought about. But itdoes affect everything, from the lowest creature and plant to the mountains andstars themselves. Nothing can escape it. These ancient peoples must have reallythought a lot about time to come up with a riddle like that. And that answerunlocked the room?”

“It did,”Dan stated. “Once we entered the right answer, the door opened by itself withno help from us.”

“Why notjust blow the door if it was that hazardous?” Harry asked.

“That ideahad been entertained,” Dan explained, “however, the door of this room is madeof that same weird metal this thing is made of. From our research of thatmetal, we found out that it is extremely resistant to explosive pressure, acid,cutting torches, etc…. In order to open that door with explosives, we wouldhave had to put enough plastic explosive on it to level six city blocks.Needless to say, that would have damaged a tremendous area in there and stillmay not have opened the way.”

“Oh. Isee,” Harry answered in realization.

“We triedall other means of getting it open though and nothing we had could getthrough,” Dan said. “Plus, anytime we tried to force the door, the guillotineblades would engage. To breech the door with tools just wasn’t feasible withthose blades chopping every time we hit the blasted thing.”

“So thedoor was pressure sensitive too,” Hannibal surmised.

“Yes,” Dananswered. “And it didn’t take long for us to figure that out too. Fortunately,we didn’t have any fatalities after Franklin.”

“That’sgood,” Hannibal replied.

“Why didn’tyou use the portal?” Mary asked.

“That’s avery good question,” Hannibal declared. “Apparently, even though the portal hasvast potential to take you anywhere you want, there are some places it can’ttake you. One of them is into the depths of the Temple. For some strangereason, the portal is unable to make contact with anything within the Temple.We can go from there to here or most anywhere else, but to destinations withinthe Temple other than the portal chamber, it just won’t do it. It’s almost asif something is shielding the rest of the Temple. We can go to outside theTemple and the portal chamber only. Apparently, the rest of the Temple is offlimits to the portal. Maybe the strange metal everything is made of isinterfering. Who knows? I know of one other place that the portal won’t openfor...Amacia. I have tried to make contact with the lost city but it just won’tdo it. The closest I can get the portal to open is a small town about twentymiles from the mountain but to make contact with the great caverns that Isuspect house the lost city, it just won’t do it just like it won’t do it forother areas of the Temple. Maybe it’s shielded or maybe those destinations justaren’t in the programming of the portal machinery. Like I said...who knows whyit’s doing that.”

“Oh,” Maryreplied. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’sokay,” Hannibal replied.

“Anyway,”Dan continued. “It wasn’t until just the other day that we figured out how toopen the door. Once the door was opened, I sent in our little robot explorerZippo to check out the room. Just as I suspected, the whole room was adeathtrap. A grid-defense system was in operation the moment the door wasopened. The floor was checker boarded with pressure triggers. Also, there weresensors in the walls that faced each other at regular intervals. When a floortrigger was tripped, metal spikes two-inches in diameter instantly rose fromthe floor and dropped from the ceiling at five-inch intervals all over theroom, impaling anything on the floor. If someone broke the contact between twoof the sensors, a flame would shoot from both of the sensors, incineratinganything between them. These sensors were placed at two-foot intervals alongthe walls at about eighteen inches off the floor and at four feet. The room wasperfectly round and the Relic sat in the center on a pedestal. Obviously,someone went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure no one would get thisthing.”

“Obviously,”Hannibal agreed. “How did you get past the defensive system in there?”

“The trapswere designed to kill anything the size of a man,” Dan informed. “Zippo isabout the size of a small cat so we were able to maneuver in there with him andsee what the traps were going to do.”

“Zippo…who’sZippo?” Harry asked.

“He’s thelittle robot I spoke of a few moments ago,” Dan said. “With Zippo’s help, wefound the switch that neutralized the traps. It took a good twelve hours to doso though. It was hidden in the pedestal the Relic was sitting on.”

“Was thepedestal bobby trapped as well?” Hannibal asked.

“Yes, itwas. We figured out upon the close examination that the pedestal was rigged toexplode when the Relic was removed. We found out about that while using Zippoto search for switch to disengage the defense mechanism. Once found, we usedhim to throw the switch and then we were able to get the Relic. That room hasto be the king of booby traps because in all of our exploration, no other roomever had so many traps,” Dan explained. “Then to add insult to injury, we hadto solve another puzzle in order to unlock it from the pedestal; however, itonly took us six hours to solve that one.”

“They hadit locked into position then,” Hannibal said, rubbing his chin with hisfingers. “Was there any writing in the room?”

“No; notthe first scribble. The room was completely barren of any type of writing,” Danstated. “I thought that was very strange because of the level of writing onwalls in other parts of the Temple. Whatever this thing is, it’s either veryimportant, very dangerous, or both. We haven’t been able to make heads or tailsof this strange writing that’s all over it.”

“Has therebeen any reference to this strange oddity in the Library?” Hannibal asked.

“Unfortunately,no at this point,” Dan answered. “We’ve barely started to dig into the Library;however, the supercomputer that you brought in to do the translations isrunning well. We’ve done about three percent of the Library so far. Being ableto scan the plates into the computer really made our lives infinitely easier.”

“Good.Good. What have you found so far?” Hannibal asked.

“So far,the information we’re getting is sketchy and full of gaps,” Dan reported. “LikeI said, we’re just getting started on the Library; however, from what I’ve seenso far, your thought that a complete history of man all the way back to thebeginning may very well be the case, though it is a bit early for a conclusivedecision on that. But there are some strange things that are beginning to comeout of there.”

“Likewhat?” Hannibal asked.

“For onething, some of the accounts that have been translated tell of alien involvementwith the people back at the beginning. Then there were these little items whichcame out,” Dan said as he rummaged through his satchel again, pulling out thehologram generator and a little disk that resembled a mini CD disk. He presseda button on the device and a disk emerged from it. Taking the disk from the device,he replaced it with the one from the satchel. After putting the disk from thedevice away, Dan keyed in a sequence on the device. The satchel disk loadedinto the device and the device hummed slightly as it did before. As before, alight shown out of the device and became a holographic representation of anotebook. Dan sat the device on the table and then proceeded to use thehologram as a notebook. He flipped through the pages and stopped at oneparticular page. “Take a look at this,” he said.

Hannibal leaned forward to see what waswritten on the pages being shown. He intently read what was written, and thenlooked at Dan with astonishment. “So this is what you wanted to show me besidesthe Relic?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Danreplied, nodding. “Needless to say, I was shocked when that turned up.”

“No doubt,”Hannibal agreed. Selina remained oblivious to what was going on for she wasstill examining the Relic.

“What’sgoing on?” Harry asked; feeling left out. “What’s the deal?”

“Just lookat this,” Hannibal instructed Harry referring to the holographic notebook.

Harryleaned forward to examine what was written. On the pages before him was writingin the language of the plates and below it, a translation. He read intently,trying to figure out what was the big deal was about. As he read, hiscomplexion changed and he got pale. “My God…I can’t believe what I’m readinghere. It’s, it’s...,” Harry stammered.

“Yes, it’sa fragment of an account of the fall of Amacia,” Hannibal crowed. “And not justthat, it gives us an exact location and a description of the Emperor.” His facedarkened slightly as he continued, “It’s just like we saw last night. My Lord,what a confirmation this is!”

“There’smore,” Dan interjected while turning the pages of the holographic notebook. “Insome of the latest translations to come off the computer, we found out that thepeople of that time had dealings with aliens from not only our universe, butwith entities from other dimensions. According to the books, some of theseentities from the outside were malevolent and extremely dangerous. There wereother entities from the outside as well that were benevolent, and apparently,the two sides were in a war with each other. It seems that, according to whatwe’ve seen so far, this planet seems to be the focal point of their fight. Sofar, the books have identified four separate alien species that they hadcontact with from this universe in addition to the contacts from outside of ouruniverse. It seems that these beings from the outside are the ones that causedhumanity the most trouble. From what I’ve seen so far, the Emperor made a pactwith these malevolent entities and used them as enforcers to keep himself inpower.”

“Did thebook say who the aliens from our universe were?” Harry asked with a bit ofconcern in his voice.

“Yes,” Dananswered. “But we haven’t come across a description of who these alien speciesfrom our universe are so far. All we have are names: Draconian, Cythian,Alkadian, and Ruticulian; however, from what we know thus far, the Emperor hadan agreement with two of the species out of which he supposedly received agreater portion of his technology: the Draconians and the Ruticulians. Thedetails here are still very sketchy but that’s what we’ve uncovered thus far.It’s of my opinion that the machinery in the Temple, including the portal, isof alien origin. Though at the moment, I have no proof of it.”

“So yoususpect that the machinery we found is, at the very least, technology that maybe retro-engineered from some alien technology,” Hannibal suggested.

“Yes, I do.But like I said, it’s too early to say for sure,” Dan returned. “And thatRelic, I definitely believe that about it. That piece is not like the rest ofthe machinery we’ve found. About the only thing that makes it similar to themachinery we’ve found is the metal it is composed of. Someone or something hidit there in the Temple to keep it from being used. For what, I have no idea.”

“I tend toagree with you,” Hannibal agreed. “From what I’ve seen, that thing is not indigenousof the technology we’ve found so far. The writing that’s on it is not the sameas the rest of what we’ve found in the rest of the Temple. Like I said, it’s anenigma. It belongs somewhere else.”

“Gentlemen,”Selina suddenly said, breaking into the conversation.

“Yes,Selina? Do you have a theory?” Hannibal asked.

“I believeI do. It may not be right, but it is a theory,” Selina declared.